Highly anticipated: AMD's press team must have taken a holiday because this weekend's been a busy one: not only has the Threadripper launch schedule been leaked, but now we also have entries into three different online benchmarks for the 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X. It's a consistent goliath, beating out its predecessor 2950X by 21%, 24% and 26% across the tests.

The Ryzen 9 3950X was paired with an RTX 2080 Ti and 16GB of 3200 MHz memory for its Fire Strike run two days ago, where it achieved a score of 29,663. That crushes the Threadripper 2950X with its average score in the same configuration of 24,544, and also presents serious competition for Intel's venerable i9-9980XE.

Intel's high core count processors have historically done much better than AMD's in gaming benchmarks such as Fire Strike, but now only have a 3% lead.

Model Cores/
Threads		 TDP (Watts) Boost/Base (GHz) Total Cache (MB) PCIe (Lanes) MSRP
Ryzen 9 3950X 16/32 105W 4.7/3.5 70 40 PCIe 4.0 $749
Threadripper 2950X 16/32 180W 4.4/3.5 36 60 PCIe 3.0 $899

Two Geekbench 5 results have been posted for the 3950X, but as the multi-core score of one result falls below the 2950X, it should be discounted. Nevertheless, the valid multi-core result is better than the 2950X by 26% and only 4.3% behind the i9-9980XE. Single-core results are stunning at 20% and 23% better than the TR 2950X, and 11% and 14% better than the i9-9980XE.

The following graph combines the new multi-core results with the Cinebench R15 leak from a fortnight ago – if you don't recall, the 3950X edged out the i9-9980XE in this test, too. All 3950X results are not TechSpot's but have been taken from online sources.

While putting too much stock in leaked benchmark results is a recipe for disappointment, the fact that the 3950X's scores have consistently been over 20% better than the 2950X suggests this is going to be one hell of a chip. Trading blows with the 18-core i9-9980XE is likewise impressive, though we'll have to see what happens with the newly announced i9-10980XE.

AMD has yet to provide a specific launch date, though it seems likely the 3950X will join its Threadripper brethren for their tipped November 19 release.